Teaser Tuesday: “The Guns Above”

So this week I was reading The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis, a low-technology steampunk adventure where they fly around in zeppelins, but shoot at each other with muzzle-load muskets, cannons, and flintlock rifles. Because why not?

The longtime reader will no doubt be shocked (yes, shocked, I tell you!) to learn that I have read a lot of steampunk. They can usually be counted on for (of course) various forms of steam-powered, airships, and at least a few confrontations between flying machines, but this book contains easily the most detailed descriptions of excactly how its zeppelins operate, not to mention the most lengthy and detailed accounts of airship combat that I’ve ever come across. It is also surprisingly funny, at least at first, for instance, in this scene early on where a General is taking a meeting with Our Hero, the soon-to-be Airship Captain Josette Dupre, in an art museum, in front of a painting of a foxhunt.

“Do you hunt, Dupre?”

“Yes, sir. Or rather, I did years ago, back in Durum. Only for food, though. And not with dogs, of course.” She laughed, hoping her nervousness wasn’t showing. “If we’d had that many dogs, well, we wouldn’t have had to hunt, would we?”

The general peered at her for several seconds and said, “What a delightful story.” He looked at Captain Katsura. “Gaston, wasn’t that a delightful story?”

Katsura seemed to consider the question, frowned, and said, “I didn’t care for the dog-eating part.”

Nobody cares for the dog-eatig part, Katsura.

As one might expect, the humor kind of falls away in the last third or so of the book, which more or less consists of a continuous running battle between Dupre’s ship Mistral and an array of enemy ground and air forces. The slugfest between the zeppelins is probably my favorite account of a gunship battle since the Not for Hire took on the Rex in the old “Riverworld” series by Philip José Farmer*, which, if not exactly steampunk, was at least steampunk-adjacent.

And now, the moment nobody has been waiting for: A teaser from one of my own books! Because I have never written anything steampunky or gunship battle-y (as far as I can recall) I didn’t really have any related works to choose from, unlike last time, and so I went and asked the Gods of Randomness what I should post, and they chose this excerpt from my book Television Man. I altered it slightly by removing one of the character’s names, to avoid spoilers. (The other names aren’t really spoilers, since the fact that a character named Bob gets involved with a vampire named Toomes is already part of the blurb I chose for the back of the book; and one can safely assume that if in a book like this there’s a vampire hunter, there is probably going to be a vampire, too.)

“Hey, Bob.”  His voice was thin, weak.

“Yeah?” Bob said.

“The Count … is really gonna be … pissed at you … when he …”  He trailed off into a gurgle; his eyes became glazed, unfocused.

Bob detected movement in the doorway, and glanced that way, hoping to see Toomes.  He didn’t.  It was the Count.  He didn’t look nearly as composed as he once had.  The skin of his face was burned in a pattern that suggested an acid splash, probably inflicted by holy water.  The creature’s black cloak was rent and torn, and further darkened by inky fluid.  The crossbow bolt still stuck out of his shoulder.  One of his eyes was missing, the socket a smoking, blackened hole; Bob thought a clove of garlic might still be in there, fused and bubbling.  The Count’s remaining eye, red and baleful, swiveled as it took in the scene.

“I think he’s pretty pissed at me already,” Bob told the dead man.

* Okay, so I haven’t read a lot of books involving gunship battles. So sue me.